February 24, 2014

"The surprises were Joseph Brodsky — expelled by the Soviet Union in 1972 — and the poet Anna Akhmatova — brutally repressed by Stalin, her husband shot by Soviet secret police and her son sent off to the gulag. Most Russians never heard of her until perestroika in the late 1980s."

10 comments:

I don't understand. How could there not have been a terrorist attack? CNN was giddy with the toothpaste tubes of doom just before the start of the Olympics, all but predicting the time and day of the first terroristic salvo.

"The scene was set in a vast library, and suddenly gales of wind blew through, sending manuscript pages into the whirlwind of Soviet persecution."

Russia is struggling back. The damage caused to Russia by the left is so massive it will probably take generations to restore most of what was destroyed. The first step in recovering from Marxism is to recognize that it is not only a false economic system but is a morally bankrupt ideology. Russia is apparently on its way to recovery.

Even those opposed to Stalin became Stalinist in their methods of opposition. Mendelstam entrusted his poetry to a lover to safeguard in case of his arrest. He was arrested. Under questioning he revealed that he had given his writings to this woman. She was also questioned under duress and gave up his writings. She felt very guilty about this.......It was all a sham. Mendelstam knew that they would ask him where his writings were hidden. He gave them to her as a dummy trove. He gave another collection to a friend whose name he did not reveal. The woman was entrusted only for the purpose of betrayal.

In 1923 a volume of his Jewish graphic art, Evrejskaja grafika Natana Al'tmana: Tekst Maksa Osborna [Max Osborn], was published in Berlin.

In 1925, he participated in Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Art Deco) in Paris together with Aleksandra Ekster, Vadim Meller, Rudolf Frentz, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and David Shterenberg. His first solo exhibition in Leningrad was in 1926.

Altman moved to Paris in 1928. In 1936, he returned to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). He worked mainly for the theatre, as a book illustrator and an author of essays about art.

Published in Germany. Lived abroad. Board member of People's Commissariat of Enlightenment. Jew.